I like Kvelertak. Today, Spotify recommended a band called Red Fang to me. (Not anything to do with Kvelertak - it was because I listened to Godflesh, who as far as I know, haven't used any owl-based artwork.)But it got me thinking, is the presence of an owl among the pictures used by a band a predictor of my liking them? So I did an experiment: google owl pictures related to bands and see how many I like (enough to follow on Spotify or add to a playlist on YouTube or whatever) and how many I dislike (or just get bored with). The first set of search terms was

bands with owl artwork

which returned a lot of pictures, many of which didn't end up being used by the band in question. I filtered out the domain (bandjob.com - pretty pictures, but a timewaster for my experiment) and went throught the list. I noticed Kvelertak was absent (for me, the owliest of bands), so also searched using these terms:

owl album artwork

Band names or album / song titles involving owls but without any owls in the artwork were not included in the survey. Where I was unable (or to lazy) to find original music by the artiste, I didn't include them. I finished when I got bored and was finding lots of duplicates and broken links. Including Red Fang and Kvelertak, I managed to get a sample size of 15. Here they are:

Only three of those went under the "like" category - not enough to justify any further analysis. It was interesting though, to note that two artistes (not included above) were Japanese jazz keyboardists, so although owls may be metal as f##k, but in Japan they're also quite jazzy.

I didn't see this when they played at the Borderline - at least as memorable as Erlend Hjelvik crowd surfing in his red chuddies I suppose...

When it was played a lot on the radio all those many years ago, I couldn't hear this Psychic TV song without being reminded of Petula Clark's Downtown.

According to a Google search, no one else seems to noticed - maybe because the Internet wasn't around back then. Which doesn't mean a search for these two will always be fruitless - a few years ago I tried to find out what on earth Peterkin Custard was, with no joy, but now it's officially documented as a ghost sign.

I like to watch a bit of reality telly last thing at night, to get me in the mood for sleep. No high drama with lots of shrieking, but calming stuff, like Judge Judy, or Animal Cops <Insert-Location-Name-Here>. So when I noticed that Discovery's Whale Wars was all about the Sea Shepherds I thought it would fit the bill nicely: lots of footage of the day-to-day practicalities of life on the high seas, marine animals, and once in a while, preventing some slimey little prick whaler from killing intelligent animals. A bit like Animal Cops Cetacean Edition I suppose. So I started taping them, but soon discovered that relaxing would not be the right word to describe it - from what I've seen so far it's all high emotion, floating whale guts, and encounters with fleets of "research" vessels which from the dialogue wouldn't be out of place on the SyFy channel. (I had no idea there could be such a thing as an Earth-based mother ship...) I suppose the clue was in the name (Whale Wars), but I'd sort of assumed that was just an attempt to make the programme seem more exciting, so I'd gone with the whole shepherds vibe and imagined trying to stop highly armed men from killing really large animals might be a gentle affair...

Anyway, the title music of Whale Wars is this:

And for some reason it puts me in mind of this:

I can imagine them being mashed together, but any search for Smashing Pumpkins vs Suzi Quatro yields nothing.